UFC Judge Scoring Analysis

DSCI 522 group 315
2020-01-23 (updated: 2020-02-06)

Summary

In this study, we aim to assess whether the judging in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is consistent with the official rules and guidance. To answer this question, we need to identify the key predictors for winning determined by the judges based on the performance and evaluate whether these predictors are consistent with the priorities of round assessments according to the official rules. We built a regression model using the logistic regression algorithm to assign weights to the features and used recursive feature elimination (RFE) approach to identify the strong predictors. Among the selected 11 features by RFE, 7 features are related to Striking/Grappling performance which should be considered as the top factor in judgment based on the UFC official rules. Our final logistic regression model using these selected features performed well on validation data set with accuracy score of 0.83. It correctly predicted 368 out of 446 test cases and incorrectly predicted 78 cases with 40 being false positive and 38 false negative. Our results showed that the judges generally comply to the UFC rules and put weights on some additional factors.

Introduction

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is the world’s premier mixed martial arts (MMA) organization. The events are to identify the world’s best martial artists. Since it is a relatively new sport, the rules are not well established and need improvement. The results of the fights are often controversy when the winning is needed to be decided by judges based on the competitors’ performance (instead of ending by submission or technical knockout). The official rules provide general guidance in judging the winner. The criteria sets priority from high to low ranking effective Striking/Grappling, effective Striking/Grappling and cage/ring Control(The ABC MMA Rules Committee 2017). As more and more controversy of the judging decisions raised, a systematic analysis of the UFC data would be very informative to evaluate the overall quality of UFC judging system.

In this project, we are trying to identify the key predictors for winning in previous UFC events and examine whether these key predictors are in line with the UFC official guidance. This analysis is very significant because it may serve as a quality control approach for the UFC judging system and help to improve the rules and training strategies for the judges in the future.

Methods

Data

The original data was obtained from Kaggle user Rajeev Warrier (Rajeev Warrier 2019). The data has also been downloaded and uploaded to a GitHub repo to avoid issues for users who do not have Kaggle accounts. Each row in the dataset represents statistics from an UFC event, including the performance features and winners (Red or Blue). The data was pre-processed by only selecting the features related to fight performance and for the each feature, the ratio of Blue fighter versus the Red fighter was calculated. The target was computed as whether the Blue fighter wins or not.

The table below explains each feature that was considered as part of the analysis:

Table 0. Data feature names and descriptions.

Analysis

The logistic regression algorithm was used to build a regression model to assign weights to all the features in the pre-processed data. The features included in the final model were selected using recursive feature elimination (RFE) approach with cross validation. A final regression model was built using these selected features and used to predict on the validation data set. The R and Python programming languages (R Core Team 2019; Van Rossum and Drake 2009) and the following R and Python packages were used to perform the analysis: docopt (de Jonge 2018), janitor (Sam Firke 2020), tidyverse (Wickham 2017), GGally (al 2018), docopt (Keleshev 2014), os (Van Rossum and Drake 2009), requests (Reitz 2019), Pandas (McKinney 2010), numpy (Oliphant 2006), altair (VanderPlas et al. 2018), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), selenium (Muthukadan 2019), scikit-learn (Buitinck et al. 2013), chromedriver-binary (Kaiser 2019). The scripts for generating the analysis and the report together with all the relevant information can be found here.

Results & Discussion

To explore the relationships between different features and between features and target, we plotted the pair-wise correlation matrix (Figure 1). The graph showed that features sig_str_att, head_att, total_str_att are highly correlated with the target. It also indicated there are some interaction between the features.

Note the correct way to read this plot is to: (1) Choose first feature of interest. (2) Find the column of squares that the features sits on top of. (3) Choose a second features of interest. (4) Find the the square where the column from the first feature and the row of the second feature intersect. This is the correlation between the two features

We categorized the features into four groups and in each group we explored the relationships between features and target (Figure 2). In general, the results showed that all the distributions of features between winning and losing were overlapped for some extend in different groups. However, each group has some features with significant difference in the means, which indicating these features may be strong predictors for the target. The result is consistent with the feature-target correlation analysis.

We chose logistic regression model to assign weights to all the features and used recursive feature elimination (RFE) with cross validation approach to identify the most relevant features and ranked them according to the weights (Table 1). Features with higher weights are stronger predictors for winning. Among the 11 features, the top feature and another 6 features are indicators of Striking/Grappling performance, which should be the first priority in judging criteria according to the UFC official rules (The ABC MMA Rules Committee 2017).This indicates the rules were generally followed by the judges. Four features do not belong to the Striking/Grappling group, such as the top second feature “head_att”. Further information are needed to evaluate whether the four features belong to the effective Striking/Grappling and cage/ring Control. Without further information, it may suggest these are some additional factors which the judges put higher weights on.

Note: The feature full name and explanation can be found in Method section.

To visualize how feature selection affects the model performance, we calculate the train and test errors using recursive feature elimination (RFE) with the “n_features_to_select” hyperprameter ranging from 1 to 22 (Figure 3). It is observed that when the “n_features_to_select” hyperprameter is 5 to 8, the train and validation errors are relatively small and have balanced bias-variance trade-off. This is not quite consistent with the number of features we got from the RFE with cross validation. However, it is not surprising that the cross validation can help to better optimize the hyperparameters while manually choosing the hyperparameters may subject to variations.

We built our final logistic regression model using the 11 features selected by RFE with cross validation and compared it with a logistic regression model using all the features. The accuracy on the train and validation data sets are reasonable for both models. The accuracy for the model with feature selection is slightly better than the model without feature selection.

The confusion matrix showed similar accuracy, where our model correctly predicted 368 out of 446 validation cases and incorrectly predicted 78 cases with 40 being false positive and 38 false negative cases (Figure 4).

Overall, we identified the key predictors for UFC winning. Most of these strong predictors are indicators of Striking/Grappling performance, which is consistent with the top criteria in UFC judgment. However, several other predictors are also heavily weighted by the judges. Although our model performed well on the validation data set, there is still room to improve and optimize the model to achieve better accuracy. However, the results may also reflect the inherent heterogeneity with the data set, suggesting there are big variations in the subjective judgement on different cases. Further areas to explore in optimizing the model are trying different models with hyperparameter optimization to select the best model. The analysis was based on finding the best features making logistic regression the default choice. Logistic regression is a very interpretive model that can be used to understand the weights of the features, but there may be models that are better for predicting the strongest predictors potentially in a black box model where you cannot see all the weights related to the features. The feature selection was done through RFE which removes features until the over accuracy goes down. Feature selection methods could be further explored.

Our model is also limited to our dataset. We would also like to get more data from outside the Striking/Grappling variables with more data to describe Cage/Ring control. Options for these further variables include average distance from the cage, number of times behind the opponent, number of times to cross the center line.

References